by Victor Serge
All the nights of his life were alike, equally empty. After leaving the office, he wandered from co-operative to co-operative with a crowd of idlers like himself. The shelves in the shops were full of boxes, but, to avoid any misunderstanding, the clerks had put labels on them: Empty Boxes. Nevertheless, graphs showed the rising curve of weekly sales. Romachkin bought some pickled mushrooms and reserved a place in a line that was forming for sausage. From a comparatively well-lighted street he turned into another that was dark, and walked up it. Electric signs, themselves invisible, filled the end of it with an orange glory. Suddenly heated voices filled the darkness. Romachkin stopped. A brutal masculine voice was lost in uproar, a woman’s voice rose, rapid and vehement, heaping insults on the traitors, saboteurs, beasts in human guise, foreign agents, vermin. The insults spewed into the darkness from a forgotten loud-speaker in an empty office. It was frightful — that voice without a face, in the darkness of the office, in the solitude, under the unmoving orange light at the end of the street. Romachkin felt terribly cold. The woman’s voice clamored: “In the name of the four thousand women workers …” Romachkin’s brain passively echoed: In the name of the four thousand women workers in this factory … And four thousand women of all ages — seductive women, women prematurely old (why?), pretty women, women whom he would never know, women of whom he dared not dream — were present in him for an incalculable instant, and they all cried: “We demand the death penalty for these vile dogs! No pity!” (“Can you mean it, women?” Romachkin answered severely. “No pity? All of us need pity so much, you and I and all of us …”) “To the firing squad with them!” Factory meetings continued during the trial of the engineers — or was it the economists, or the food control board, or the Old Bolsheviks, who were being tried this time? Romachkin walked on. Twenty steps farther he stopped again, this time in front of a lighted window. Between the curtains he saw a table set for supper — tea, plates, hands, only hands on the checked linoleum: a fat hand holding a fork, a gray slumbering hand, a child’s hand … A loud-speaker in the room showered the hands with the cry of the meetings: “Shoot them, shoot them, shoot them!” Who? It didn’t matter. Why?
Because terror and suffering were everywhere mingled with an inexplicable triumph tirelessly proclaimed by the newspapers. “Good evening, Comrade Romachkin. Have you heard? Marfa and her husband have been refused passports because they were disenfranchised as artisans formerly working on their own account. Have you heard? Old Bukin has been arrested, they say he had hidden dollars sent him by his brother, who is a dentist in Riga … And the engineer has lost his job, he’s suspected of sabotage. Have you heard? There is going to be a fresh purge of employees, get ready for it, I heard at the house committee meeting that your father was an officer …” — “It’s not true,” said Romachkin, choking, “he was only a sergeant during the imperialist war, he was an accountant …” (But since that right-thinking accountant had belonged to the Russian People’s Union, Romachkin’s conscience was not entirely at ease.) — “Try to produce witnesses, they say the commissions are severe … They say there is trouble in the Smolensk region — no more wheat …” — “I know, I know … Come and play checkers, Piotr Petrovich …” They went to Romachkin’s room, and his neighbor began telling his own troubles in a low voice: his wife’s first husband had been a shopkeeper, so it was more than likely that her passport for Moscow would not be renewed. “They give you three days to get out, Comrade Romachkin, and you have to go somewhere at least two hundred miles away — but will they give you a passport there?” If it turned out that way, their daughter obviously couldn’t enter the Forestry School. Gilded by the lamplight, the ax came down on the head of a horse with human eyes, voices lashed through fiery darkness demanding victims, stations were filled with crowds waiting almost hopelessly for trains which crawled over the map toward the last wheat, the last meat, the last combines; a prostitute from the Boulevard Trubnoy lay gaping wide open on a pallet beside a sleeping child pink as a sucking pig, pure as the innocents Herod slaughtered, and a prostitute cost money, five rubles, a day’s pay — yes, he must find witnesses to face the new purge with, was the new rent scale going into effect? If in all this there was not some immense wrong, some boundless guilt, some hidden villainy, it must be that a sort of madness filled everyone’s brain. The game of checkers was over. Piotr Petrovich went home, thinking of his troubles: “Most serious, the matter of the interior passport …” Romachkin turned down his bed, undressed, rinsed out his mouth, and lay down. The electric light burned on his bed table, the sheet was white, the portraits mute — ten o’clock. Before he went to sleep, he read the paper carefully. The face of the Chief filled a third of the front page, as it did two or three times a week, surrounded by a seven-column speech: Our economic successes … Prodigious, they were. We are the chosen people, the most fortunate of peoples, envied by a West destined to crises, unemployment, class struggle, war; our welfare increases daily, wages, as the result of Socialist emulation by our shock brigades, show a rise of 12 per cent over the past year; it is time to stabilize them, since production has shown an increase of only 11 per cent. Woe to the skeptics, to those of little faith, to those who nourish the venomous serpent of Opposition in their secret hearts! — It was set forth in angular periods, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; numbered too were the five conditions (all now fulfilled) for the realization of Socialism; numbered too the six commandments of Labor; numbered too the four grounds for historic certainty … Romachkin could not believe his senses, he turned a sharp eye on the 12 per cent increase in wages. This increase in nominal wages was accompanied by a reduction at least three times as great in real wages, as a result of the depreciation of paper money and the rise in prices…. But in this connection the Chief, in his peroration, made a mocking allusion to the dishonest specialists of the Commissariat of Finance, who would receive exemplary punishment. “Continued applause. The audience rise and acclaim the orator for minutes. Salvos of shouts: ‘Long live our unconquerable Chief! Long live our great Pilot! Long live the Political Bureau! Long live the Party!’ The ovation is resumed. Numerous voices: ‘Long live the Secret Police!’ Thunderous applause.”
Feeling unfathomably sad, Romachkin thought: How he lies! — and was terrified at his own audacity. No one, fortunately, could hear him think; his room was empty; somebody came out of the toilet, walked down the hall dragging his slippers — no doubt it was old Schlem, who had stomach trouble; a sewing machine purred softly; before getting into bed, the couple across the hall were quarreling in little sentences that hissed like lashes. He felt the man pinching the woman, slowly twisting her hair, making her kneel down, then hitting her across the face with the back of his hand; the whole hall knew it, the couple had been reported, but they denied it and were reduced to torturing each other without making any noise, as, afterward, they cohabited without making any noise, moving like wary animals. And the people listening at the door heard almost nothing, but sensed everything. — Twenty-two people lived in the six rooms and the windowless nook at the back: twenty-two people, all clearly recognizable by the most furtive sounds they made in the stillness of night. Romachkin turned out the light. The feeble glow of a street light came through the curtain, tracing the usual pictures on the ceiling. They varied monotonously from day to day. In the half-light, the Chief’s massive profile was superimposed on the figure of the man who was silently beating his wife in the room across the hall. Would she ever escape from her bondage? Shall we ever escape from falsehood? The responsibility was his who lied in the face of an entire people. The terrible thought which, until now, had matured in the dark regions of a consciousness that feared itself, that pretended to ignore itself, that struggled to disguise itself before the mirror within, now stripped off its mask. So, at night, lightning reveals a landscape of twisted trees above a chasm. Romachkin felt an almost visual revelation. He saw the criminal. A translucent flame flooded his soul. It did not occur to him that his new knowledge might avail him nothing
. Henceforth it would possess him, would direct his thoughts, his eyes, his steps, his hands. He fell asleep with his eyes wide open, suspended between ecstasy and fear.
Romachkin took to haunting the Great Market — sometimes before the office opened in the morning, sometimes late in the afternoon after his work was done. There, from dawn to dark, several thousand human beings formed a stagnant crowd which might almost have appeared motionless, so patient and wary were their comings and goings. Patches of color, human faces, objects, were all overwhelmed by the uniform gray of the trodden muddy ground which never dried out; misery marked every creature there with its crushing imprint. It was in the suspicious eyes of market women swathed in shapeless wool or prints, in the earthy faces of soldiers who could no longer really be soldiers, though they still wore vague uniforms that had been in battle only to flee; it was in the frayed cloth of overcoats, in hands that held out unexpected wares: a Samoyed reindeer glove fringed with red and green and lined inside — “Soft as down, citizen, just feel it” — a solitary glove, as it was the solitary merchandise the little Kalmuck thief had to offer today. Difficult to tell sellers from buyers, as they stood shifting their feet or prowled slowly around one another. “A watch, a watch, a good Cyma watch — buy it?” The watch ran only seven minutes — “What a movement, listen, citizen!” — just long enough for the seller to pocket your fifty rubles and vanish. A sweater, worn at the collar and patched in the body, ten rubles — done! A man dead of typhoid had soaked it with his sweat? — Certainly not, citizen, that’s only the smell of the trunk it was in. “Tea, real caravan tea, t’ai, t’ai.” The slant-eyed Chinaman chants the magic syllables over and over, looking at you hard, then passes on; if you answer him with a wink he half pulls out of his sleeve a tiny, square painted packet in which Kutzetsov tea used to come in the old days. “It’s the real thing. From the Gepeou co-op.” Is he sneering, the Chinese, or is it the shape of his mouth, with those greenish teeth, that makes him look as if he were sneering? Why does he mention the Gepeou? Can he belong to it? Strange that he’s not arrested, that he’s there every day — but they are all there every day, the three thousand speculators, male and female, between the ages of ten and eighty — no doubt because it’s impossible to arrest them all at once, and because, no matter how many raids the police make, the creatures are legion. Among them too, their caps pulled down to their eyes, stalk the police detectives in search of their prey: murderers, escaped convicts, crooks, renegade counter-revolutionaries. This swarming mass of human beings has an imperceptible structure, like an ancient bog. (Watch your pockets and shake yourself well when you leave, you will certainly have picked up some lice; and beware of those lice, they come from the country, from prisons, from trains, from the huts of Eurasia — they carry typhus; you can pick them up from the ground, you know; people that have them sow them as they walk, and the filthy little insect, who’s looking for a living too, climbs up your legs till it gets to the warm place — they know what they’re doing, the little beasts! What — you really believe that the day will come when men won’t have lice? True Socialism — eh? — with butter and sugar for everybody? Maybe, to increase human happiness, there’ll be soft, perfumed lice that caress you?) Romachkin vaguely listened to the tall bearded man who was discussing lice with evident enjoyment. He followed “Butter Alley,” where of course there was no alley and no butter to be seen, but simply two lines of standing women, some of them holding lumps of butter wrapped in cloths; others, who had not paid the inspector for their places, kept their butter hidden in their bodices, between waist and breasts. (Now and again one of them was arrested: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, speculator!”) Farther on was the section of illegally slaughtered cattle, meat brought in the bottoms of sacks, under vegetables, under grain, under anything, and which the sellers scarcely showed. “Good fresh meat — buy it?” From under her cloak the woman produced a shin of beef wrapped in a blood-stained newspaper. How much? Just feel it! A sinister fellow with an epileptic tic held a peculiar piece of black meat in his crooked sorcerer’s claws, saying not a word. You can even eat that, it’s cheap, all you have to do is cook it well, and the only way to cook it, of course, is in a tin dish over a fire in some empty lot! Do you like stories about women who have been dismembered, citizen? I know some interesting ones. A small boy went by, carrying a kettle and glasses, selling boiled water at ten kopecks a glass. Here began the legally constituted market, with its wares duly displayed on the ground. But what wares! An incredible juxtaposition of dark glasses, oil lamps, chipped teapots, old snapshots, books, dolls, scrap iron, dumbbells, nails (the big ones were sold by the piece, the small ones, which you examined one by one to make sure the points weren’t broken, by the dozen), china, bibelots from the old days, shells, spittoons, teething rings, dancing slippers still vaguely gilt, a top hat which had belonged to a circus rider or a dandy under the old regime, things impossible to classify, but which could be sold because they were sold, because people lived by selling them — flotsam from innumerable wrecks battered by the waves of more than one flood. Not far from the Armenian theater, Romachkin at last found himself interested in someone, in something. The Armenian theater was composed of a number of large boxes covered with black cloth and pierced with a dozen oval holes, into which the spectators put their faces — thus their bodies remained outside while their heads were in wonderland. “Still three places free, comrades, only fifty kopecks, the show is about to begin — The Mysteries of Samarkand in ten scenes with thirty actors in real colors.” Having found his three clients, the Armenian disappeared behind the curtain to pull the strings of his mysterious marionettes and make them all talk himself, in thirty different voices — houris with long eyes, wicked old women, servants, children, fat Turkish merchants, a gypsy fortuneteller, a thin devil with a beard and horns — imitating the fire-eating assassin, the amorous tenor, the brave Red soldier … Not far away a squatting Tatar watched over his merchandise: felt hats, carpets, a saddle, daggers, a yellow quilt covered with strange stains, a very old fowling piece. “A good gun,” he said soberly as Romachkin bent over it. “Three hundred.” Thus they became acquainted. The fowling piece was useless, except to attract the dangerous client. “I have another one at home that’s brand new,” the Tatar — Akhim — finally said at their fourth meeting, after they had drunk tea together. “Come and see it.”
Akhim lived at the end of a courtyard surrounded by white birches, in the district of quiet, clean little alleys around Kropotkin Street (they had to go through Death Street to reach it). There, in a cavern darkened by the hides and felts that hung from the ceiling, Akhim displayed a magnificent Winchester with two shining blue barrels — “twelve hundred rubles, my friend.” That was Romachkin’s salary for six months, and the gun was not at all the weapon for what he had in mind — only two shots, clumsy to transport. Well, by sawing off part of the barrel and two thirds of the stock, it could be carried under an ordinary suit. Romachkin hesitated, weighing the pros and cons. By going into debt, by selling everything he owned which was salable, and even stealing a few things from the office besides, he could not get together six hundred … A series of dull explosions shook the walls and rattled the windowpanes. “What’s that?” — “Nothing, my friend, they’re dynamiting St. Saviour’s Cathedral.” They dropped the subject. “No, really,” Romachkin said, “I can’t, it’s too expensive. Besides …” He had said that he was a hunter, a member of the official hunter’s association, and consequently had a permit … Akhim’s face changed, Akhim’s voice changed, he went for the singing tea-kettle, poured tea into their glasses, sat down opposite Romachkin on a low stool, and drank the amber beverage with relish; doubtless he was getting ready to say something important, perhaps his final price, nine hundred? Romachkin could no more get together nine hundred than twelve hundred. It was devastating. After a long silence he heard Akhim’s caressing voice mingling with the distant boom of an explosion:
